Road Trip to Odessa

The 2019 Darwin May Ball was over…done and dusted. And what an incredible party it had been. I’d never have guessed back then it would be the final Darwin May Ball for the foreseeable future, and now consider myself very fortunate to have been involved in its organization…in fact, extremely fortunate to have been at the University of Cambridge from 2017 to 2019, the final years of normality pre-coronavirus.

I’d received many compliments throughout the evening for my efforts as food officer and all 600 guests had been well fed. I’d spent £18,000 on food, ice cream, and sweets for a party which ran for six hours, and the food concessions had made their own respective profits; everyone was happy.

The first food provider I’d contacted had been my friend and baker/pizzaolo, Michael, and I’d even managed to supply him with two staff members for the evening in the form of my good friend, Libei Wu, and a friend of hers she’d invited from London on very short notice.

I’d met Libei through Facebook several months previously. She’d popped up as one of those ‘people you may know’ on my feed. I didn’t know her at all but, after flicking through her photos, I certainly wanted to; she was also studying at Cambridge, after all. She accepted my friend request and I’d kind of forgotten about her until she waltzed into Darwin Bar’s pool room with four Chinese guys in tow. Libei was definitely the leader of the gang and these guys all knew it.

Libei is a very cute and elfin Chinese girl studying for a PhD in Developmental Studies at Newnham College and she’d accompanied me as my guest to Homerton College’s May Ball a couple of weeks before Darwin’s. I’d obviously behaved myself because we’ve since become best friends.

Along with Big Pat, Michael’s right hand man on the festival scene, Libei and her friend had made it four pizzaoli serving that evening.

Many Cambridge University May Balls employ the services of Aromi, a local Italian food shop, but I’d wanted to provide the guests with the experience of fresh pizza from a wood-fired oven. I’d told Michael to close the pizza stall at midnight so we could all party together for the last few hours. We’d managed to remain awake and vaguely compos mentis for the Survivor’s Photo just before 3am, and then we and all other guests had headed off home or on to further parties - Darwin College is situated in a residential neighbourhood, hence such an early (and disappointing) cut-off point.

I’d handed in my notice to Ivan, the Darwin College catering manager, the previous week and, boy, was I glad to see the back of that career. It had served its purpose, however – I’d managed to remain at my alma mater for an extra eight months and had paid off a substantial part of the money Darwin had loaned me. My biggest reason for not wanting to leave Darwin though was the Darwin bar, my many friends there, and the nourishment of the conversation every evening.

I awoke next morning and met up with Michael and Big Pat for a beer at The Granta, the closest pub to Darwin College, situated on the bank of the River Cam. These two couldn’t be more dissimilar: Michael is the skinniest baker I’ve ever met with very little hair on his head while Big Pat, as his soubriquet denotes, is an enormous tank of a man with the wildest, frizziest dark hair one can imagine…complimented by an equal amount of facial hair and a generous smile. We’d been working together making pizza on the UK Summer festival scene for the past few years which is exactly why Michael was the first food provider I’d contacted.

It was a beautiful morning with cobalt blue skies and the cold beer was a refreshing balm to my vague hangover. We were all three of us in pretty high spirits following such a successful evening, although I do remember Pat complaining about the rough night’s sleep on the floor of Michael’s Transit van.

The beers were finished and the guys jumped into the van.

“Safe journey, man, I’ll see you tonight or tomorrow,” I said as they pulled out and headed off towards Trumpington and the M11.

I slowly walked to my Dodge 50 truck in the car park of Granchester Meadows and began the final ‘tat-down’ of all my possessions. I’d already completed most of the packing in anticipation of this moment. I locked the back doors, jumped in the cab, fired up the engine, and allowed her to idle for ten minutes while I jumped down and said my goodbyes to this park-up which had been so good to me over the last nine months (an unheard of length of time to remain parked in the same spot but, then, the Universe always seems to favour me since I recalibrated my life). Climbing back into the cab, I strapped on the seat belt and started out on my road trip to far-off Georgia, 3,000 miles East.

That evening I spent the night on Peacehaven’s seafront, lulled to sleep by the crashing of waves and the wind rocking the truck. I was awakened by the heat of the rising sun blazing through the windscreen and lay in bed a while longer, smiling at the anticipation of the imminent adventure.

Remaining asleep in a truck in Summer is never an option so I climbed out of bed and made coffee, ate some breakfast, and then followed the directions to the farm Michael had given me. Pulling in to the yard, I drove the Dodge round behind a barn and saw Michael tinkering about with the caravan he’d bought for the road trip.

“Morning, Dude, how you doing?” Michael enquired.

“Yeah man, slept like a baby. The sea, the wind…was awesome. You?”

“Cool. Walked the dog pretty early then came to sort the caravan. Whatcha think?”

I took a walk around the caravan, checking it out. A Sprite, I seem to remember, around 16 feet long and at least that may years old. Pretty similar to a thousand trailers I’d seen hippies living in on sites and festivals for the past thirty years.

“You reckon she’s good for a trek across Europe without falling to pieces?” I teased him. “How much did you pay?”

“She’d take us there and back, no problem; I paid a grand.”

“Okay, where’s my Dodge going?”

“Follow me, I’ll show you.”

I jumped back in the truck and followed him over to a low barn. This had been arranged in advance – somewhere sheltered from the elements for my truck. My plan at that point was to drive across Europe to Georgia, work with Michael selling pizza’s for a few months (from a 1950’s Russian school bus we’d be converting into a pizzeria) while saving money for a month’s holiday visiting friends in different Chinese cities. I’d then return to Georgia to continue working/saving while deciding on my next move. The way I saw it, my Dodge would be left alone for maybe as long as a year and needed to be left somewhere dry. This barn was perfect. She’s actually still there at the time of writing…awaiting another makeover and the next adventure.

After loading all the materials we’d need in Georgia into Michael’s Transit (especially all the gear required to build a pizza oven in the school bus), we concentrated our efforts on loading any excess baggage into the caravan and then I hitched it up to the Transit. I raised the jockey wheel, plugged in the electrics, and then gave Michael the thumbs-up to confirm everything was hooked up.

Michael confidently pulled forward way too fast and I could see he wasn’t going to clear the gate post.

“Woah!” I screamed.

Nope, too late: as the Transit turned left through the gate, the rear corner of the caravan clipped the metal post and I heard the crunch of twisting aluminium, timber, and steel.

“What the fuck you doin’, man?!”

It was evident Michael hadn’t towed anything this long before. I was expecting him to await my instructions from where he could clearly see me in his mirrors. Now the rear corner of the caravan was in pieces before we’d even left the farm. Bits of aluminium, timber, insulation, and the rear light cluster were all hanging from a gaping hole – Fuck! Was it at this point I should’ve re-evaluated my decision to follow Michael the Baker across Europe to Georgia?

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The gulls were screaming and careering above our heads in the wind, and the sun was glinting from the windscreens of the trucks secured to the deck below. I took another pull on the spliff before passing it to Michael and could feel a knot of excitement twist my stomach. Christ, how many times had I felt this before? The ferry pulling away from its berth, taking me away from the shores of my homeland - a homeland I was extremely angry with.

The Brexit vote had affected us both in the same way – a deep and sad sense of premonitory doom for our nation. I’ve never been much of a patriot and neither have I followed politics too much, but this felt like a betrayal of all I felt as a European traveller, while feeling like a victory for the xenophobic hordes believing the Daily Mail’s headlines of “swarms of immigrants arriving on our shores to steal our jobs”; believing the bullshit of the likes of Farage, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, et al. This had been a strong driver in my decision to get away from the UK for a while, to gain some breathing space from the claustrophobia that was Brexit.

Vacillating between drinking a few beers in the bar and smoking in the wind on deck, we watched the white cliffs of Brittania recede into the distance from the stern while the uncertainty of our future approached from the bow. It didn’t seem too long before we saw the church tower of Calais a few miles ahead.

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The Transit began to slowly eat up the miles, Michael constantly checking the wing mirrors to ensure we hadn’t left the caravan somewhere behind. He would also have been ensuring our makeshift repair back at the farm was still sound. We’d found a large piece of aluminium angle in one of the farm sheds and secured it vertically to the corner Michael had destroyed in his haste to escape.

We were singing along to the sounds of Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘B-Movie’ – “Mandate, my ass” – and laughing together. This was often a feature of our trips to and from festivals, especially that song. Also featuring often on the stereo, one of my all-time favourite road trip tunes: Neil Young’s ‘Out on the Weekend’, this being a song I’d busked around the South of France for six months on my first ever extended travelling adventure when I was in my mid-twenties:

“Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick-up, take it down to LA,

Find a place to call my own and try to fix up, start a brand new day.”

Belgian and French Autoroutes, service stations, and péage slowly morphed into Autobahns just as my language skills had to morph as we crossed each border – ironically, considering I’d learnt some German as a teenager, my French, Italian, and Polish skills had very much surpassed it over the intervening years.

Just as in life, a road trip is a steady stream of mundanity – i.e. driving for hours, stopping for fuel, food and coffee, sleeping, paying at toll booths – with occasional bursts of excitement, wonderful sights, and memorable or hilarious moments. This was certainly the case as we slowly wended our way across Western Europe, towns and meadows blurring into one, architectural styles shifting and changing from one region to another, and place names becoming less familiar and more difficult to pronounce.

Signs for Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, Kassel, Leipzig, and Dresden flashed past as we meandered our way through the German countryside coming ever-closer to the Polish border. We had no desire to leave the Autobahn and explore any of these cities – our goal was Tbilisi, Georgia, and Michael wanted to arrive there and start work on the bus conversion as soon as possible.

He was happy to do most of the driving although occasionally I did take over to give him a break. We’d pull over and crash out in the caravan once we were both too tired and then rise in the morning to make fresh coffee and buy some croissant or similar from service stations. Showers aren’t a problem on European trips because the majority of service stations have them available for all travellers, not just long-distance hauliers – they simply require a set of car keys as deposit.

We were heading for a German village which was off our direct route to Georgia via Ukraine because Michael had agreed to collect and transport a bun-making machine for his French baker friend, Jean-Jacques, who was resident in Tbilisi, Georgia; he was in the process of fitting out his own bakery and had purchased the machine.

Arriving at a tiny German hamlet, we searched for the address and soon found it. We introduced ourselves to the guy we’d been instructed to find and he directed us to the bun-maker – it looked very heavy and didn’t disappoint. With the help of three guys who worked at the premises - and some ingenuity - the five of us managed to manhandle it into the Transit and then Michael and I secured it with ratchet straps. The van wheel arches disappeared as the body sank with its weight and the Transit immediately became more cumbersome to drive.

We found a supermarket across the street, bought some provisions and plenty of water to drink - the sun was high and the heat was impossible to escape in the cab of the van – then found the Autobahn and continued east.

Crossing the border into Poland was a relief as I had a better command of the language. Granted, most of my Polish lexicon wasn’t acceptable to the general public as I’d been taught by Polish construction workers in the UK, but I’d also picked up enough to understand and speak the basics.

I’ve always been pretty good at picking up languages, something I discovered on my early travels around the South of France. Not all that surprising really when you consider the temporal lobe is the auditory and language centre of the brain. Language learning is also the most effective way of being accepted within a group in a foreign country. There’s a lot of kudos to be garnered when the locals see you’re making an effort as well as there being a symbiosis of learning, an exchange of language and culture…one of the biggest reasons I enjoy travelling so much. I’ve never gone in for that stereotypical thing many English tourists do…you know: Union Jack swimming trunks, full English breakfast, Sky Sports on the TV, expecting everyone to parle anglais. It’s awful and stinks of arrogance and colonialism. Whenever I am in a foreign group, be it in Italy, Portugal, France, or the Netherlands, I always cringe when asked where I’m from…until my response is invariably met with, “No, that’s not possible, you can’t be English!” This always pleases me as it reveals I’m not typically English (phew!); I’m more European/international.

The motorways in Poland were as smooth and fast-moving as those back home in England so we continued to make good progress. I took a turn at driving while Michael tried to get some sleep but the ambient temperature made it impossible so instead he rummaged through his CD collection and pushed a Curtis Mayfield album into the stereo - Michael loves a bit of Curtis whereas my chosen music at that time was either Serbia’s Goran Bregovic, the No Smoking Orchestra, or Leningrad: very rowdy Russian ska from St. Petersburg.

I spotted a sign for Katowice. This town, I knew, wasn’t far from Auschwitz.

My ex-partner, Emma, had planned a group party in Krakow for her 40th. Birthday celebration. A trip to Auschwitz and the famed salt mines had been top of the list of places to visit (“a typical Polish school trip” our Polish friend, Olga, had humorously referred to it at the time) and I remember a lot of discussion around whether to visit Auschwitz at the beginning or end of the trip as it would obviously have an impact on the celebrations. The Krakow trip never did come to pass though so I still hadn’t visited that terrible place.

I realised I may never again be as close as I was and felt it a duty to go there. I suggested this to Michael and, although we both knew it would be a harrowing experience, he agreed on the small detour.

The first thing we saw was the infamous tower with its archway, the archway through which cattle-cars filled with Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, and POWs had passed through on their way to the sidings and selections. It looked just as it had in every image I’d ever seen. We pulled into the car park and both felt a sombre change in mood descend upon us.

Beyond this, I shall describe no more of our visit…the emotions which were elicited during those two hours will remain with me for as long as I breathe. This was the first of only two stops we made between Calais and Odessa.

Continuing our drive towards the border with Ukraine, the van was filled with silence as the pair of us digested all we’d seen and felt. There was no need to speak. We simply shared the silence and left each other alone with our respective thoughts.

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It was dark when the traffic began to slow. An array of bright red brake lights began to glow and blink along both lanes before us. I remember Michael and I thought there’d been an accident. However, after a short while, people began to exit their vehicles – coaches, trucks, and cars – and formed small clusters, smoking, pouring tea, drinking beer, and eating. It became obvious there was a wait ahead of us so we followed suit and did the same. I wandered off to the roadside, clambered over the barrier, and had a pee down the embankment, then returned to the van and pulled open a can of beer.

I remember the traffic was still for almost an hour before any movement and, even then, it merely crawled ahead ten yards. Then, the same again twenty minutes’ later – this was gonna be a long night. This stop/start/move ten yards/repeat continued for at least two hours before we saw a lit gantry ahead indicating this was the Ukrainian border. The lanes funneled into one single lane the border guards had left open and this explained why progress had become so painfully slow; a thousand vehicles all passing through the eye of a needle.

As the cars approached this juncture, some drivers wouldn’t give way to others, and these in turn became frustrated with those not giving way. The beeping of horns, raising of voices, and angry waving of arms were all to no avail. In reality, the waiting had only just begun. There really ought to have been a sign reading:

“Welcome to Krakovets – A Version of Hell”

How to describe the night-time scene which welcomed us once we finally got through to customs? My first experience of Ukraine. This was a place from the Soviet era, surely? An enormous grey concrete gallery bathed in the kind of low wattage light you’d find in 1950’s film noir. The border guards were wearing military fatigues or smart green uniforms straight out of the Lubyanka, the modernity of Europe was less than a kilometre behind, and we now inhabited an archaic and Kafkaesque world whose sole existence appeared to revolve around timelessness and protokol.

I consider myself quite well-travelled. I’ve spent plenty of time in several different European countries on many different occasions over thirty years. The World map I replaced my TV with a few months ago has 27 pins denoting towns and cities I’ve visited in Europe alone. I’ve travelled around Thailand, I’ve been to Morocco, and I’ve been culturally shocked by some of the places I’ve visited…but, nothing had prepared me for this Ukrainian border post after travelling across Western Europe. It literally felt like a reality shift - surreal is the word I’d use to describe it today and I’d have plenty of time to observe it more once the protokol really kicked in.

As Eugene Hütz says to Elijah Wood’s character with a wry grin in the movie, ‘Everything is Illuminated’: “Welcome to Ukraine”.

An interminable wait commenced. Our passports were required to be seen once, twice, three times over an hour or two while remaining parked in the same spot we’d initially halted at. Michael and I smoked cigarette after cigarette waiting for some form of progress but none was forthcoming. We were surrounded by a novel scene of hawkers trying to sell anything from individual cigarettes to bread and cakes and refreshments, an entrepreneur’s cavern where the women looked like babushkas draped in headscarves and the men all seemed to have stepped straight from an Emir Kusturica film set. Such an incredible shift from European to Slav culture in such a short distance, from the EU to a completely different planet.

Finally, one of the green-uniformed guys came and indicated to Michael he should follow him. They walked off together somewhere to my left and the long wait really began.

Again, one hour passed, then another…and another. By this time, I was beginning to wonder what the fuck was actually going on? I had some beers in the cab with me but distinctly remember thinking to myself, “But what if Michael doesn’t return and I need to drive the Transit?” so I resisted. Any books I may have brought along were somewhere in the back of the van, no doubt impossible to retrieve due the accursed bun-making machine.

As it turned out, the bun-making machine was the sole reason we weren’t simply ushered through customs like many of those preceding us. Michael finally turned up after four long hours and explained he’d been sat in a waiting room full of truckers, all of whom endured a similar tedium awaiting transit papers. The authorities’ concern was we may try and sell the machine within Ukraine’s territory so therefore all kinds of protokol had to be adhered to and we couldn’t proceed without the correct authorization papers.

There was one final check before we’d be permitted to continue with our adventure: a search of the rear of the Transit van. Michael opened the back doors for the inspection but, after taking one look at the size and evident weight of the bastard machine, the border guards told him to close it back up and, basically, fuckoff to wherever we were headed.

Fantastic – freedom at last!

As we pulled out of the gallery of Babel and entered Ukraine proper, the sun was beginning to rise. We’d spent around seven hours crossing one border due to Jean-Jacques’ bun-making machine.

After driving for ten minutes we pulled over and took a celebratory photo to post on Facebook so our friends and followers could see we were making ‘good’ progress. Little did I know at the time this same photo would be used on a crowdfunder page a couple of weeks later as I lay delirious with pneumonia in a Tbilisi hospital being pumped full of intravenous antibiotics. But, that was later.

We jumped back into the Transit and I opened Google Maps on my iPhone to seek the fastest route to Odessa, where we needed to catch the ferry across the Black Sea to Batumi, Georgia. But, no, it wasn’t having any of it. We’d left the EU and my network provider was no longer providing. Using the maps without the search facility, I figured the quickest route was to head towards Lviv on the M10 and then pick up the E40 to Ternopil, then the E50 which would take us to the E95 – the main route south to Odessa. One fact Michael and I noticed very quickly was the change in road surface. Basically, the route from Cambridge all the way to Krakovets had been driven on roads which were very well made. This no longer seemed to be the case. The road we were on now seemed much less smooth and a lot bumpier and was a harbinger of things to come.

I took another turn at driving and plugged my own phone into the stereo – Leningrad. Not really Michael’s cup of tea but he endured stoically while I pointed the Transit east and footed the accelerator.

“Is it just me or have we suddenly entered a Third World country?” I asked of Michael.

“Not just you, man, no, but more like a Second World country. You’ll find many similarities in Georgia – they’re both trying to join the EU but have too much governmental corruption to sort out before they’re able; both ex-Russian federation and threatened by Russian occupation on a daily basis; and both fucked by their respective Orthodox Churches.

“Look over there, see that town? What do you notice about it?”

I followed the direction of Michael’s pointing finger. To our south lay a small village or town which had a kind of run down vibe to it.

“It looks dirt poor…?” I ventured.

“Exactly, but how about its church?”

“Well, that don’t look so bad at all.”

“No, because all the money goes to the church… it’s like England a hundred years ago…or more. Georgia’s the same, the church has a disproportionate amount of power and controls pretty much everything.”

“Man, that sucks,” and I meant it.

We continued rolling, passing many more towns or villages where I now couldn’t help noticing this disparity of wealth Michael had pointed out to me, the gleaming church with a brand new gilt roof huddled among beat-up homes looking in dire need of some maintenance. This really started pissing me off as we skirted more and more towns with the same shit going on.

“Fuck the church,” I thought to myself, “it’s the same in the UK. They own so much land, property, and silver and gold, yet there’s always an appeal for money to repair the roof, always a collection box passed around during the services. Completely back to front yet never confronted by the flock of believers. I guess they gotta be gullible to fall for that shit in the first place.”

I wound up the volume on the next Leningrad track soon as it came on while Michael passed me a spliff. I continued driving for another thirty minutes.

“Where the fuck are we?” I heard Michael ask. He had a point, there was no sign of any town, village or habitation anywhere around us, just the dirt track the road had transformed into and miles of flatland strewn with clumps of shrubbery and trees. I pulled over and a cloud of dust continued in the direction we’d been heading.

“Lemme look at the map,” I said and opened my phone. “Okay, there’s absolutely no signal…the map won’t even open.”

Michael checked his own phone and, likewise, nothing.

“Right, straight on is east so let’s just keep going until we see a sign, yeah?”

Michael began to laugh.

“’Til we see a sign? How’s that gonna help, we don’t know where the fuck we are.”

“Speak for yourself, man. I know where we are…we’re hundreds of miles from the UK and that’s good enough for me. And if we keep driving east we’ll get some signal eventually then come to the motorway down to Odessa, right? Simple. Now do something useful and skin up while I navigate our way out of here.”

I pulled out onto the road while Michael made the spliff and within twenty minutes we were halted by some roadworks. A new bridge was being built to replace the old one and the road was closed. All that existed as a road now was evidently only fit for construction traffic or individual cars, not a Transit van towing an almost twenty-foot-long caravan.

“Aww, bollocks, I can’t be arsed with driving around looking for a way around this without a bloody map,” said Michael.

“So whatcha gonna do?”

“We’ll make it,” he answered.

“Are you kidding? You’ll never make it. Look, the road’s like a bowl…the trailer will bottom out.”

“I’ll do it. You stay outside and guide me and I’ll make it,” he insisted.

I wasn’t as confident as he was but, fuck it, it wasn’t my caravan that would be destroyed even more than it already had been.

I walked forward a bit as Michael lined up the van and slowly approached the large dip parallel with the centre of the almost-but-not-quite-finished bridge. I motioned Michael forwards but, as I’d suspected, the rear end of the caravan hit the dirt road and prevented any further onward movement. I was almost praying to the gods I’d been cursing for the past couple of hours the caravan wasn’t stuck. Michael threw the van into gear and managed to reverse back to where he’d begun.

“Okay,” he shouted, “I’m gonna make a run for it. What d’ya reckon?”

Oh shit, this could mean the end of the caravan/our mobile bedroom…we’d be sleeping in the back of the van tonight if this went wrong.

“Ain’t my caravan, man,” I laughed, “it’s up to you.”

With that, Michael pulled forward and picked up speed enough to force the caravan beyond the point it had become stuck. I waited for the impact, not knowing whether the extra speed would allow it to make it, or completely destroy it. The Transit raced forward, there was the sound of the rear end smashing onto the dirt road, a large cloud of dust, and then the caravan flew past me and up onto the solid road beyond. He’d made it but what was the damage?

The junction of the back wall and underside of the caravan was hanging loose, just as one corner had been back at the farm, and the offside light cluster was clinging on by its wires…other than that, we still had somewhere to sleep.

“Hahaha! Told you I’d make it!” Michael was out of the van, dancing in the dust and we were both cracking up laughing. I took photos of the road he’d just conquered for posterity, and we got the drill out for some impromptu repairs before we could continue with the trip. Then we were back on the road with Michael behind the wheel.

We continued for an hour or so re-living the events at the bridge, passing spliffs back and forth, and laughing uproariously. Neither of us could believe the caravan hadn’t simply exploded – that would come later. We’d learn soon enough impunity has a shelf-life.

As the van continued east, we spotted a large lake on our left hand side. The sun was bouncing off the many ripples created by people taking turns diving from three or four staged platforms.

“Hey man, quick, pull over. Let’s have a swim.”

The sun was high and the air was dry and dusty. No mirage in the desert would have been more welcome than this oasis in the middle of the arid plains we’d been driving through.

Michael pulled over and switched off the van. First thing I did was check our repairs to the back of the caravan – it wasn’t good. The unevenness of the roads hadn’t helped at all and the back was once again falling to bits. Michael’s abuse was beginning to take its toll.

“Okay, let’s swim. We can deal with that afterwards,” I slammed the door and headed for the delightful looking lake and its cool promise.

Climbing the ladder to the first platform I made a note of exactly where those preceding me were diving and joined the queue. It seemed to be plenty deep enough to dive without concern then it was my turn. I walked to the edge and dove. The water was perfect. The sun had been warming it all morning and it wasn’t as cold as I’d anticipated. I broke the surface, swam back to the ladder, climbed out and re-joined the queue as Michael leapt from the platform and disappeared in a huge splash. Awesome, this was exactly what we needed after baking in the Transit non-stop for hours.

Feeling progressively braver after a few dives from the lowest platform (and being assured by an English-speaking diver this was an old quarry and was therefore really deep), I tried the next-highest platform and took several dives from this one too. We both continued diving until we tired of it and then sat on the lakeside smoking a spliff before walking around the lake to a café. After coffees and some food, we were dry and refreshed and ready to hit the road again.

Before our departure though, I found myself lying on the dirt road beneath the rear end of the caravan, drill in hand trying to make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. The caravan’s rear end was hemorrhaging badly and we had limited supplies of tools – a handful of screws and a roll of gaffer tape, no more. I gave it my best shot and we waved goodbye to the lake refreshed by its waters and feeling much cleaner.

We were off again - eastwards. Next stop Odessa. My phone found some signal and I typed in Odessa. I was given two options and, as would normally be the case, I chose the quickest route, a saving of twenty minutes or so. This would turn out to be a terrible mistake but I had no way of knowing this at that time. We followed the route I’d chosen and soon found signposts for Lviv, the next big town on our itinerary.

Ever so slowly and without our really noticing it the roads began to deteriorate. Small potholes began to appear ahead of us and then became progressively larger. The traffic in both directions began to weave and wend its way around them, often causing opposing lanes to stop and allow oncoming traffic to negotiate these holes. We’d skirt one hole and the caravan would invariably drive over it, then we’d stop and allow someone ahead to negotiate the next hole in their turn. Then repeat the process ad infinitum. This stopping then trying to avoid a hole in the road continued for maybe thirty or forty minutes, the caravan swaying from left to right every time it drove straight over a hole. In fairness to Michael, it was impossible to predict whether the caravan would skirt the holes as he’d tried to do, or drive right over them. Both directions of traffic at this point were driving at five miles an hour – lorries, buses, cars, everyone. I couldn’t believe the roads had been allowed to reach this level of fucked-upness…this was the main road to Lviv from Krakovets.

Then, magically, a swathe of brand new tarmac-ed road appeared and all traffic reverted to fifty or sixty miles per hour again, as if the potholed road was simply something we’d imagined. This road brought us all the way to our first destination, Lviv.

We’d been driving through the town for fifteen minutes when I noticed a police car in the passenger wing mirror. It seemed to be following our progress.

“No way, man, they’re gonna condemn the caravan,” I laughed.

No sooner had I said this than the police car flashed its headlights at us, let out a short blast of its siren and pulled us over. Shit, what now?

It turned out there was nothing to worry about. These guys were really nice and didn’t seem concerned the caravan was held together with a piece of aluminium angle and a roll of gaffer tape. They spoke some English and simply asked us where we were headed then offered to show us the road we needed for Odessa. They indicated we should follow them and then pulled ahead and led the way. What a lovely surprise – we weren’t being led off to Lviv’s Lubyanka to have our fingernails pulled.

Once it was evident we’d seen the sign for Odessa, our escort flashed its hazard lights as a goodbye and left us to be on our way – result.

We left the town’s suburbs behind us and followed the dual carriageway taking us further east, a straight ribbon of wonderfully flat and smooth tarmac. Fantastic, it appeared we were going to make Odessa by this evening.

We were climbing a long hill and doing around fifty miles per hour. As we reached the top Michael pulled over into a lay-by and switched off the engine. He wanted to grab something from the caravan before continuing. He climbed out and disappeared from sight while I took a look at the map on my phone.

I heard the sound of laughter from somewhere behind me. Then the laughter become harder and louder. “What the hell’s up with him?” I wondered.

“Christian, come here, man. You gotta see this,” Michael was calling between fits of laughter.

I jumped down from the van and went to join him. He was stood at the caravan’s entrance door practically holding his stomach while still bursting with laughter and pointing at something in the caravan.

I walked closer and saw exactly what was so hilarious: the interior of the caravan was destroyed…completely. All the cupboards at the top of the walls were now lying on the bed, the main cupboard to the left of the door was broken and misshapen and, after further inspection, we saw the caravan’s huge front window was falling out of its frame and was ready to land in the road at the next big bump.

I too joined in the laughter. The disastrous Ukrainian roads had shaken the caravan to death, all that swaying from side to side and bouncing over huge potholes had finished it. I took photos of the trashed interior and closed the door. We did the best job we could of securing the front window in its frame, and slowly set off again, this time with an awareness the caravan was slowly dying.

As Michael drove, I leant out of the passenger window and soon realised the biggest problem was the roof. The front of the roof was no longer attached to the front wall so, as the Transit pulled the caravan forwards, the roof was trying to free itself from the main body like the lid of a sardine can. Shit, this was really bad. If we continued, the roof would eventually be ripped off by the wind and fly through the air onto someone else’s car or - far worse - their windscreen, and cause a crash.

“Pull over, man,” I urged Michael. “We need to have a think about this. We can’t keep pulling this thing - it’s lethal.”

Michael obliged. I rolled a spliff in-between my laughter and concern.

“What we gonna do? We can’t keep driving or we’ll cause an accident.”

“Look, why don’t we find a road in those woods over there? We can drive it in deep and set fire to it.”

“Michael, are you out of your mind? We’re in Ukraine, for fuck’s sake! The border guards have just taken an inventory of everything you’ve entered the country with – Transit van, bun-making machine, you think they might have missed a small thing like a sixteen-foot caravan?

“I can just see us pulling up at the ferry in Odessa with a missing caravan. Meanwhile, there’s a police bulletin about a caravan set on fire in the woods outside Lviv. You’d make a really shite criminal.

“No, what we have to do is unhitch the caravan, leave it here, and go back to Lviv in the Transit to find those nice policemen and tell them the caravan’s fucked and we can’t continue to Odessa with it. They’ll need to come up with a solution.

“Burn it in the woods…Jeez.”

We never did find the friendly policemen from earlier. We did, however, manage to find some other guys who helped us and the whole process took only a few hours (I’d been expecting reams and reams of paperwork, a fuck-ton of protokol, and perhaps even a warm cell for the night as was my usual experience with police stations).

These guys asked us to lead the way to the offending caravan and, upon arrival, agreed in Ukrainian, “This ain’t going anywhere.”

Next, they contacted a farmer friend who was more than happy to inherit a free chassis which could be turned into a farm trailer. We awaited the arrival of this farmer and a short while later he hitched the thing up and it disappeared from our lives…fantastic.

These guys really were great. They indicated we should follow them once again and a half-mile down the road they pulled into a guest house, explained to the proprietress an unfortunate experience had befallen these English travellers, and we were given a double room to share with the most enormous cuddly toys either of us had seen in our lives. Special rates were applied for the room because we had contacts in the Lviv police force, and we both enjoyed our first sleep in a real bed since leaving the UK almost a week ago.

I awoke in the morning feeling totally refreshed and, after coffee and croissants, stepped outside to be greeted by another glorious sunny day. It was around nine or ten in the morning and the temperature was rising nicely. It already felt like a great day to be driving without dragging dead weight behind us. Michael showed his face shortly afterwards and we hit the road again, laughing and marvelling at our good fortune.

“Those guys were so cool, man,” I said to Michael and he could only agree.

It actually took us more than seven hours to reach the E95 at Uman which gave me an idea of the vastness of this country (the drive from Krakovets to Uman is 11.5 hours which is probably half the width of the country). Every few miles along this main route from Kyiv to Odessa were roadside stalls with men or women hiding from the sun’s baking heat beneath awnings selling enormous green melons. Odessa was now within our reach, three hours away.

The surrounding countryside was mostly flat and the clearest memory I have of that drive is the sunflowers. I’ve never before seen so many sunflowers - acres and acres of them - on both sides of the road. I think most of the world’s sunflower seeds must come from the fertile lands between Uman and Odessa.

Shit, we were being pulled by the police again. Michael had been speeding through a section of motorway where the speed-limit was 50 KPH. The police had waved at him to stop but he’d ignored them so they came racing behind with flashing lights and pulled us. He pulled over and we both got out of the van - me to stretch my legs, Michael to get nicked.

These guys didn’t have such great English, fortunately for Michael. They made some stern noises about his ignoring their gesture for him to stop, quickly scanned his driving licence and then let us continue on our way. Thirty minutes later and we were entering Odessa.

We headed for the beach and found somewhere to park the van. Michael knew the spot from a previous visit. We found a bar on the seafront and found some new friends immediately. The girl serving was pretty funky, she was wearing black leather gloves, had a sexy vibe, and was playing some fantastic tunes really loud – if I were a bar owner, she’d be running my bar for me. The guys hovering around kept buying drinks and she kept serving them…clever girl. This included myself and Michael. I was smitten and saw no reason to change location.

This was where we met a friend who I’m still in touch with today: Bogdan Alexandrov (I don’t think you could find a more typically Ukrainian name, there are probably thousands of guys with this name). He turned up at some point in the late afternoon, his English was very good, and he enjoyed a drink. What’s not to like?

He invited us back to his place saying his partner would be home from work in an hour or two, we could eat together, and then he would show us some places of interest. Like most people you meet when travelling, he was proud of his country and wished to share this national pride with us…he was also a lovely guy with a wonderful smile. We drove the van back to his place following his directions, hitting a shop for beer and provisions en route.

As promised, Bogdan’s partner, Daria, showed up a while later and she was as vivacious and lively as was he. Wonderful, Michael and I had been blessed with a pair of lovely friends on day one. We broke bread together and shared some nice food, they played us some of their favourite music (Bogdan is a big Joy Division fan), and then we headed out into the Odessa night to check out some sights.

We saw many monuments and statues that evening but the site I most wanted to visit was the Potemkin Stairs. Typical tourist, I know, but I’d watched the Battleship Potemkin movie two or three years previously and remembered the tension of the runaway pram hurtling down these steps so wished to see them.

It was quite late in the evening when we did see them and I remember running from the first or second landing all the way to the top while Michael, Bogdan and Daria casually walked up. They found me there feigning cool after running up 80 steps or so (I’d always do this, especially the stairs to Darwin’s dining hall, as a way of staying young and fit – walk down any staircases but run up them).

We spent a lovely evening with these two and I was extremely pleased to hear they married last year. Only last month I checked some English for Bogdan’s business website and I’m very much looking forward to seeing them again later this year. We parted company and Michael and I went off to find a guest house to spend the night in.

We were forced to remain in Odessa for three days due to ferry times and, it goes without saying, there was a fuck-ton of protokol to deal with at the ferry terminal during that time.